Dynamic Busan

I took a bus to Busan from Suncheon this morning at 8:20. It was about three hours, and it took me about twenty minutes by Busan subway to reach the area of town where the Thai Airways office is located. My host mother had coached me on how to ask people how to get to the appropriate building, but after wandering a little around the neighborhood and asking one convience store clerk who didn't know, I gave up and hailed a taxi. The building was nearby, but I never would have found it myself. I purchased my roundtrip plane ticket to Thailand (560,000 won, in cash, man was my wallet fat) and then walked back to the subway station. On my way I passed an area that looked like a Chinatown, and decided to try to get some non-Korean food for lunch. There were a couple Chinese restaurants, but the area seemed dominated by Russian businesses. The predominance of expatriate businesses reminded me of what a big city Busan is. In Suncheon, there are a fair amount of foreigners considering its size, but one thing I noticed in Busan was that all the foreigners I encountered on the street were old--in other words, probably naturalized. Whereas the majority of foreigners in Suncheon are young Canadians just out of university that are teaching at private cram schools. And there aren't really any foreign businesses to speak of in Suncheon.

I ended up eating at a Filipino restaurant, because I'd never had that kind of food and I thought I could probably read the menu. The waitress was really friendly and spoke English--she explained some of the dishes to me. It was an interesting establishment even though the food was pretty expensive--the place seemed to double as a convenience store, and all the signs were in English as opposed to Korean. A Filipino movie was playing on the TV, but she put on an American DVD for me. It was "Fear Dot Com" (Is that Pauly Shore?), a pretty bad movie but I appreciated the gesture.

I had contemplated sticking around Busan and having dinner with my friend Billie, an ETA there, but there weren't too many buses back to Suncheon and I didn't want to get in too late, so I left around 3 pm. This weekend I have plans with Mr. O, the third year English teacher at my school. Originally we were going to go hiking on Saturday, but it turns out a friend of Mr. O is getting married and so he thought it would be a good opportunity for me to see a Korean wedding. And on Sunday we'll be going to the Nagan Folk Village for the food festival. But I think the weekend after that I'll probably go to Busan again. Jairus tells me they have some pretty cool Halloween parties there.

Reading: Finished "Brighton Rock" by Graham Greene, and on the bus I finished "Ham on Rye" by Charles Bukowski. I liked them both, but I think you probably have to be into those particular styles (which are very different from each other). Partially read on the bus/subway: The July issue of "The Believer" magazine and "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera, which I've been meaning to read for a long time.